White Water td-106 Page 2

  Only when they were surrounded on both sides by the two dories could the true nature of the whitefaced ones be discerned.

  White greasepaint coated their faces. The blue splotches were greasepaint, too. They formed a crisp design. At first Roberto thought of a fish. But, of course, he would. Fish were his life. The designs were not fish. They were too ornate. Coats of arms are sometimes filled with similar designs. In this case, Roberto did not know the name or significance of this design. Only that it was hauntingly familiar.

  "Why are their faces painted that way?" muttered Carlos.

  "To protect against the cold," said Roberto, who thought it must be true. What other reason could there be?

  The dories bumped the old dragger's hull and were made fast. Roberto ordered his sons to help. He himself stood on the heaving deck, shivering in his orange waders and rubber boots, the hood of his grimy gray sweatshirt protecting his head. He was still thinking of the father of codfish that had almost been his.

  "Who speaks English?" he asked as the first of the white-faced ones clambered aboard.

  No one, it seemed. For when they were on board, pistols were displayed.

  "Are you Canadian fisheries inspectors?" Roberto asked nervously, knowing that fisheries officers operated undercover at times.

  No answer. Not even in French. It was strange. Their faces were strange with their blue clown mouths and bold blue noses spreading angular wings over their gleaming white cheeks.

  "We are a U.S. vessel," said Roberto, thinking that perhaps with the Spanish name on their stern they were being mistaken for a Spanish vessel. Relations between Canada and Spain were very strained even now, two years after the so-called Turbot War.

  They were urged into the boats. Not a word was spoken. It was all grunting. Perhaps some of the grunts were French grunts. Roberto could not say. He knew little enough of French.

  Nodding to his sons, he led them to the dory that awaited them.

  "We will obey these men, for we are in their lawful waters," Roberto said simply.

  Soon they were being conveyed to the immense factory ship. One man remained with the Santo Fado. If their boat was seized, there would be very great trouble. It had happened before, during the trouble over turbot. Scallop poachers had lost their trawlers for illegal fishing. They never got them back.

  As they muttered toward the Hareng Saur, something in the water caught Roberto's eye. It looked like a shark making its way. Or a porpoise. But the waters were too cold for a harbor porpoise.

  With a stab in his heart, he thought, Torpedo!

  The wake was arrowing unerringly toward the big gray sea behemoth.

  Roberto started to speak up. To point. He was shushed with a hard look and a wave of a pistol. It was very eerie the way the white-faced ones operated in utter silence.

  Roberto counted the long seconds to impact.

  The thing had to be a torpedo. It was closing very fast. Glimpses of gunmetal gray showed in the gray water. It looked to be as long as a man. Or the Patriarch cod, he thought. But that was impossible. Cod were silvery of skin. And this thing moved like a machine.

  Three seconds, Roberto counted. Two. One...

  The wake ran into the gray hull, just below the waterline.

  No explosion sounded. No impact came. No nothing. The wake simply ran into the side of the ship and was no more.

  Perhaps it was a porpoise after all, diving playfully under the great gray hulk, Roberto thought.

  Roberto turned his thoughts to his predicament. When the dory eased to the hull of the big ship, lines were lowered from davits and the dory was hoisted to open cargo holds in the side of the ship, then swung in.

  They were escorted through the stinking hold, where fresh-caught fish were processed and frozen as quickly as they were disgorged from nets.

  Even for a lifelong fisherman like Roberto Rezendez, it was an ugly sight. This was a gigantic processing plant. This was why there were no cod. Ships such as this devoured and reduced to cat food and fish sticks entire fish schools in a day's time.

  A corporation owned such a vessel, he knew. No hardworking family fisherman could afford it.

  "This," he whispered to his sons, "is why we have no future."

  Fish were being ripped-gutted and halved-at conveyor belts in cold rooms. The stench of gurry in the malodorous hold was nauseating.

  Passing a porthole, Roberto chanced to look out. There, out in the cold gray-green Atlantic, he saw the rusty bow of the Santo Fado slip beneath the waves. Just like that. He froze but was prodded on.

  Glancing out through the next porthole he came to, Roberto saw no sign of his trawler. Only a lone dory cutting the water from the place he had left his livelihood.

  Could it be? Had they scuttled her? Was it possible? Roberto said nothing. But all over his body the sweat was cold and clammy, and his stomach began to heave not from the dismal stench but in fear for his life-and the lives of his sons.

  They were taken to a steel room whose floor was choked with fish entrails and other leavings. Roberto knew what this was. The fish paste called susumi would be made from such offal. Probably in this very room. It would be used in cat food.

  The door valved shut. It was a very bad omen. Interrogations were not conducted in such quarters.

  "I would like to explain myself," Roberto began.

  He was ignored. Workers in bright orange waders and black rubber boots used long forks to pitch fish offal into a vat. There were blades or something whirling in the vat. They whirled and spun, chewing up the bony fish so that the bones would be small and soft and digestible.

  "We were not taking cod. We were tracking the Patriarch. Do you understand?" Roberto repeated the word cod and made the time-honored gesture to show the fish's span. Of course, his arms were too short to truly encompass the size of the cod he had tracked with his fish-finding sonar.

  The men with the blotchy blue-and-white faces laughed at him. A fish story. They thought he was telling them a fish story. It was understandable.

  Roberto was searching his memory of Portuguese for common words that a Frenchman might understand. The languages had many similar roots. It was possible to communicate with these men before something strange transpired. He remembered the French word for cod, amazed that he possessed this knowledge.

  "Morue," he said, stumbling over the syllables.

  One of the men pointed to the vat of pureeing fish. "Poisson chat," he said in response. His blue smile was rimmed in pink, like a cut mackerel.

  "Eh?"

  "Poisson chat." The smile widened so the red of his gums and inner lips was grotesque against the blue greasepaint surrounding them.

  "Catfish!" Roberto exclaimed. "Yes. Catfish. I understand." But he didn't understand. Why were they speaking of catfish? Catfish were not caught out here in the cold Atlantic. Catfish were freshwater fish. What did they mean by catfish?

  Then it hit him. Not catfish. Fish cat. Fish for cats. They were processing cat food. That was what they meant.

  A kind of relief settled over Roberto Rezendez's weathered features, and he smiled sheepishly.

  That was when two men stepped up and ripped Carlos. Just like that. It happened with stunning suddenness.

  Two white-faced men. They strode up, swinging long tuna knives. Both stepped in, and one thrust his blade into Carlos's unsuspecting right side while the other pierced his left. In the belly. Low in the belly. The blades touched one another with a rasping sound-touched deep in the bowels of Roberto Rezendez's eldest son, and he screamed as Carlos screamed. It was a stereo scream.

  Manuel joined in, too. A whisking blade separated Manny from his nose. It fell to his feet, perfectly intact. He ran. Or tried to.

  Someone gaffed him like a fish. They used a pole with a hook at the end of it, plunging it into his back. Like a fish, Manny fell to the scummy floor and flopped as the harpoon was driven deeper into his helpless body. The point made an awful rasping sound as it scraped living bone.

/>   Roberto Rezendez had both of his case-hardened fists up and was rushing to the defense of his sons, when the two with the long tuna knives drew them out and turned to confront their attacker.

  The blades were red with the blood of Carlos. Roberto stared at them in numb disbelief. It was the blood of his son on the blades. His blood. The blood that had flowed through the veins of the Rezendez family for many generations. And here these-these crazed Frenchmen were spilling it as casually as they gutted fish.

  Face atwist, Roberto made to seize those blades. They were sharp, but his anger was sharper still. He swore foul oaths his grandfather seldom used. He cursed these butchers when his hard fingers closed over the bloody blades and the white-faced ones whipped them back, leaving blood on Roberto's palms that might have been his sons' or his own. It didn't matter. It was the same blood, and he would shed all of it to avenge his family.

  The blades danced and cut the air, shedding scarlet droplets with each twist. The blood spattered Roberto's face. It got in his eyes. They stung. He tasted blood through his set teeth and he grunted out the low Portuguese curses his foes did not understand, could not understand, because all they spoke was doggerel French.

  The blades whacked and chipped at Roberto Rezendez as if he were a totem pole being whittled. Except that he bled. As his sons writhed on the floor in their death torments, their lives irredeemably lost, Roberto threw punches and kicks at the white-faced tormentors, who danced in and out of range, claiming pieces of his own flesh.

  The end came for Roberto Rezendez as one man feinted, while the other slipped around and, with two expert slices, whacked off a collop of biceps.

  The man danced back with the piece of meat that Roberto knew was his flesh balanced on the tip of his red blade. He flicked it back over his shoulder. It landed in the vat, where it made a raspberry blotch that was soon swallowed by the churning puree.

  Roberto knew his fate then. He was to be cat food. No one would ever find him. No one would ever know his fate. Nor the fate of his sons. Not Esmerelda, not Esteban. Not the grandchildren who had yet to be born to carry on the Rezendez name.

  "Why are you doing this?" Roberto screamed.

  The blades found his belly and his throat, and in that last memory, Roberto Rezendez knew how it felt to be a fish taken from its natural environment to be flayed and boned by strange creatures for an alien purpose.

  That last knowledge was a very bitter one. He was a man. He stood at the pinnacle of the food chain. It was absurd to be killed to feed the idle cats of the world. Let the cats fish for their own food. Let them eat fish, not Portuguese.

  In his last moments of life, they gutted him. He was too weak to resist. The ripping sounds of his parting abdominal muscles were like sailcloth tearing in a gale.

  Roberto watched the gray, slippery loops that were his own entrails as they were deposited into the vat of fish offal.

  Santa Maria, he prayed. I call upon you to send to earth an avenger. For I have done nothing to deserve this. Nothing but fish.

  In his last moment, he wept. Then he was one with the fishes who were, and had always been, his destiny.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo, and he didn't understand the mission.

  It was not the usual mission. The usual mission generally came in one of two flavors. Hit a known target. Or infiltrate and discover an unknown target's identity. Then hit him.

  Nothing was said about hitting anyone this time out.

  That was strange thing number one.

  Strange thing number two was the tractor trailer.

  Remo was not licensed to drive tractor trailers. Not that he would let that stop him. After all, a tractor trailer was nothing more than an overgrown truck. Remo had driven trucks before. This one was longer and it had a lot more wheels, but it was still just a truck.

  The instructions were simple enough. Pick up truck at rendezvous point A, drive it to point B and wait.

  "Wait for what?" Remo had asked the lemony voice on the telephone.

  "You don't need to know at this time."

  "Do I need to know ever?"

  "You'll know what to do when the time comes."

  "How's that?" asked Remo of Harold Smith, his boss.

  "Everything has been arranged. The loading will be done for you. Just drive the shipment."

  "Drive it where?"

  "Call me en route."

  "En route where? North, south, east or west?"

  "You cannot drive east of Lubec. You will drive into the Bay of Fundy."

  "I feel like driving into the ocean right now," Remo complained.

  "Just obey instructions. You cannot go wrong."

  "If you say so," said Remo. "Anything else I should know?"

  "Yes. How to double clutch."

  "I'll ask someone," said Remo, who then went in search of the Master of Sinanju.

  Chiun was not at home.

  "Must have gone for a walk," muttered Remo. He was going to leave a note, but the single Western-style pen in the house was out of ink. The goose quill and ink stone Chiun used were locked up tight, so Remo simply dropped down to the corner market and called his own house from a pay phone, leaving a message on the machine. It cost him a dime, but he figured it was worth it.

  The drive to Maine had one good thing about it. The part of New Hampshire he passed through was very short. Of all the states of the union, Remo liked New Hampshire the least. He had heard about New England Yankees. His boss, Harold Smith, was one. Remo once thought Harold Smith was just a tightass until he visited New Hampshire and realized that Harold Smith was a typical product of New Hampshire-bloodless about everything except money. Smith would rather swallow a nickel than see it roll down a sewer grate.

  Once in Maine, Remo began to relax. Maybe it was the fact that trees outnumbered people in Maine. It wasn't that Remo didn't like people. It was that he had to be particular about whom he associated with. Since he was a sanctioned assassin for a supersecret government agency, this was important. It wasn't that Remo had a cover to protect. He had once been Remo Williams, a Newark cop, until his existence had been erased. Now he was just Remo, last name optional. According to his truck driver's license, he was Remo Burton. But that was just in case he was pulled over. He lived simply, did no work except take on missions and tried to lead an ordinary life within those narrow constraints.

  For many years, it had been simple. Remo had no social life to speak of. But now he was dating again. Really dating. The way normal people normally did. And it was an education.

  For one thing, Remo had to relearn that women liked to know a lot about their dates. Otherwise there were no more dates.

  They particularly wanted to know what their date did for a living.

  Normally all Remo had to do was pull out a fake identity card and he was whoever the card said he was. That was fine for missions. But what about a second date? Or a third? He was stuck being Remo Bogart, FBI special agent. Or Remo MacIlwraith, with the Massachusetts State Police.

  Then there were the dietary differences. On one memorable date he sat across a restaurant table from a woman who calmly poured milk into her iced tea, explaining that the milk bound the cancer-causing tannins, then confessed to having been a former substance abuser.

  "What substance?" Remo had asked guardedly.

  "Sugar."

  Remo's feeling of relief lasted only as long as it took to wonder what kind of person could turn common table sugar into a abusable substance.

  When she started salting her iced tea, Remo decided there would be no second date.

  Then there were the ones who were pretending to be single when they weren't. After a while Remo learned to ask Smith for a husband sweep via computer. Two times out of three, a husband would pop up on Smith's monitor. Once, thanks to Harold Smith's diligence, Remo discovered he was dating a female bigamist.

  It was all very discouraging.

  "Where are all the sane single women?" Remo had shouted into the phone
one disappointing day.

  "Married," said Smith over the wire.

  "Avoiding you," said Chiun calmly from the next room.

  And everybody, but everybody, wanted to go to bed on the first date. There was no chase involved. Remo liked the chase. Instead, he was the chasee. It was a problem he'd had for years. Women reacted to him the way cats react to catnip. One sniff and they were rolling on their backs, purring.

  The way things were going, Remo felt he was going to have to retire from dating again.

  But first he had to get the eighteen-wheeler he picked up in the Lawrence, Massachusetts truck stop to Lubec, Maine, located at the easternmost point of the U.S. according to the map. It was tucked up there on the Bay of Fundy, under New Brunswick.

  Why he had to drive the freaking truck all the way up to Lubec still eluded Remo. He hadn't figured out how to double clutch yet. He had gotten on the cab CB and hailed various truckers who came into view.

  They patiently explained it to him, but every time Remo tried, he managed to miss a step and found himself crawling along in first gear.

  Finally Remo decided to speed shift through the sixteen or so gears and let the transmission watch out for itself. He had a run to make.

  JUST SOUTH OF ELLSWORTH, barreling along in eleventh gear, Remo ran out of luck. He was ramming it through the gears, and the transmission soon began grinding like a coffee machine trying to turn lugnuts into espresso.

  "Uh-oh," he muttered.

  The eighteen-wheeler slipped into the low-ratio gears, and Remo urged it along with all his strength, which was considerable.

  In third gear he crawled along another two miles while traffic blared and veered around him. Then he pulled over.

  From the soft shoulder of I-95, Remo called Dr. Harold W. Smith, the director of CURE, the agency he worked for.

  "Bad news. I lost the transmission."

  Smith said, "It is imperative that you make the drop zone."

  "This is a drop?" Remo said.

  "The Ingo Pungo is due in three hours."

  "Is that a ship?"

  "Yes."

  "I'm meeting a ship?"

  "Yes," Smith repeated.